Technology imports and self-innovation in the context of innovation quality

There is great meaning to analyze the relationship between technology imports and self-innovation under the frame which divides innovation into innovation quantity and innovation quality. In this paper, on the foundation of building mechanism of how technology imports and self-innovation influence innovation quantity and innovation quality, we comprehensively analyze performance of technology imports and self-innovation and relationship between them in high-tech industry by using panel threshold regression model and Bayesian vector autoregression (VAR) model. Our results suggest that technology imports and self-innovation has higher performance in innovation quality; technology imports have lower performance in innovation quality; technology imports and self-innovation has complementary relationship to a lesser extent; the threshold effect of innovation outputs by self-innovation is significant while the effect by technology imports is not significant; with increasing of technology imports level, the elasticity of self-innovation to innovation quantity is inverted U-shaped while the elasticity of self-innovation to innovation quantity is upward. China is now in the transition from concerning innovation quantity only to concerning both innovation quantity and innovation quality.